Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon. – Foreign Policy

Dominant Social Theme: The fall of the USSR was due to moral failure.

Free-Market Analysis: This article entitled, Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong (And why it matters today in a new age of revolution) is interesting simply for the sheer scope of its ambition. The author Leon Aron, is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and has also written a forthcoming book, Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991. Presumably the article is drawn from the book.

Why analyze this article? It is a meme in the making, in our view. The subdominant social theme here is that the USSR collapsed because it is corrupt. The subtitle of the article is "Why it matters today in a new age of revolution." This implies that the same process that undermined the USSR is undermining the countries in African and the Middle East. Here's some more from the article:

The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union's collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism – call it anti-anti-communism – that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime's stability and legitimacy. Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise.

One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union."

Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected." A collection of essays about the Soviet Union's demise in a special 1993 issue of the conservative National Interest magazine was titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism."

We can see here that Leon Aron is setting up a problem – why should a country so powerful and dominant as the Soviet Union collapse. The answer that he provides in the article and the book is that people seek empowerment and usually sooner or later are not wiling to be afraid anymore. He sees this conclusion as operative in Syria, Tunisia, etc.

As regards Tunisia, specifically, he writes, "The fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation set off the Tunisian uprising that began the Arab Spring of 2011, did so 'not because he was jobless,' a demonstrator in Tunis told an American reporter, but "because he … went to talk to the [local authorities] responsible for his problem and he was beaten – it was about the government."

Aron quotes Libyan protestors as well. He writes, "In Benghazi, the Libyan revolt started with the crowd chanting, 'The people want an end to corruption!' In Egypt, the crowds were "all about the self-empowerment of a long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own leaders, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported from Cairo this February. He could have been reporting from Moscow in 1991."

He ends the article by warning portentiously, "Unless we remember this well, we will continue to be surprised – by the 'color revolutions' in the post-Soviet world, the Arab Spring, and, sooner or later, an inevitable democratic upheaval in China – just as we were in Soviet Russia."

If one is inclined to be cynical, one is most surprised that such a distinguished author could write a book and an article for a major magazine without mentioning the CIA and US State Department-sponsored AYM youth movement's involvement in these so-called Color Revolutions. But then again, selling the accidental history meme is a regular part of the mainstream media's menu du jour.

All one needs to do is Google "CIA Color Revolution" and TEN MILLION citations are retrieved. Is it possible in all his years of agonized effort (writing a book is always an effort) Mr. Aron NEVER ONCE typed in this phrase? And if he did not, what does that tell us about the depth of his research and the strength of his hypothesis?

In truth, we have a different version of history in mind. The Internet has shown us with some conclusiveness that the Anglosphere elites were involved in funding the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler's National Socialist Party (see Allen Welsh Dulles or John Foster Dulles) and may even have played a part in smoothing the way for Mao's Long March and subsequent surge to power.

One also finds the CIA involved in numerous national and pan-European sociopolitical manipulations, most famously Operation Gladio, which involved the creation of a kind of European "stay behind" army along with strategic "terrorist" bombings that were apparently attributed to violent socialists and hard-core Marxists.

Closer to home, there was the CIA-created Operation Mockingbird, which called on leading US publications to position news and information so as to support larger CIA/National objectives. There is no reason to think that Operation Mockingbird is done. Then there was Operation Northwoods, which contemplated killing civilians on a plane flying in the US and attributing it to Castro's Cuba as way of generating a war. Great bunch of boys, eh?

There are numerous other suspicious incidents regarding ways that US Intel and military intelligence has manipulated historical events. The sinking of the Maine precipitated a war with Spain. The "surprise attack" on Pearl Harbor engaged the US in World War II. The killing of John F. Kennedy resulted in a significant ratcheting up of the Vietnam War.

Each of these incidents and many others have received a good deal of analysis and coverage; what has not been done for the most part by mainstream journos and historians is to put them into a larger context. When this is done, a significant and shocking pattern emerges. It becomes clear that one can make a case for wide scale manipulation of most of the important events of the 20th century.

History, Henry Ford said, is "bunk." He was making this comment during an era when history was being actively manipulated and the US was being inevitably drawn into World War II by the power elite of the day. But we have seen the same manipulations occur in the 21st century with wars and revolution.

With our own Elvish eyes we have seen the takedown of the World Trade Towers and the subsequent, never resolved questions that continue to plague that attack. We have seen the US go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure that whatever happened to the World Trade Towers "never happens again."

Pursuing this notion, the US chased after Osama bin Laden, the purported terror chief of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden, however, seems to have been a CIA asset and al-Qaeda ("The List"), a fighting force assembled with CIA input and support. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were fought, then, to pursue a former CIA asset and a former CIA-assembled fighting force in order to avenge a terrorist act that up to 50 percent of the US population itself doesn't believe occurred in the manner that US authorities have claimed.

Subsequent to these wars, we have Color Revolutions springing up around the world that are supposedly spontaneous but are evidently and obviously manipulated by Western Intel when one looks more closely. The death of bin Laden (who likely died years ago of kidney dysfunction brought on by Marfan's Syndrome) occurs at an especially propitious time: The US is anxious to remove itself from Afghanistan and declare "mission accomplished" and Barack Obama is eager for reelection. And now, miraculously, bin Laden is dead.

Within the above context we would submit it is perfectly possible that the fall of the USSR had more than a little Western involvement. Was it in a sense planned? Was the inexplicable crumbling of this great bête noire of the West somehow staged? Gorbachev himself – the architect of Perestroika – has gone on a series of comfortable UN assignments and has surprisingly managed to gain fairly lavish funding for his own NGO activities. Others seem to have been similarly "rewarded."

One can speculate about the entire arc of Cold War relations and how much of it was a kind of shadow play. Lenin was injected by Germany back into the USSR, like a bacillus, and Stalin later became an ally of the West during World War II. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was said inexplicably to have handed the whole of Eastern Europe to Stalin during post-war negotiations (to Winston Churchill's – feigned? – horror). What if it were not so inexplicable after all? What if that was the plan of Western elites, to create a perpetual Cold War, as they aspire always to a state of constant war for purposes of internal, domestic control.

What if the relationships of those at the top of the Politburo and the City of London were far more cordial than history explains? What if Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table in purposeful buffoonery? What if Gorbachev was complicit in a planned takedown of the Soviet Union? What if Glasnost was as much a fakery as the NASA moon landings now seem to have been?

Ford was right; history is bunk and thanks to the Internet for confirming it. There is plenty of nobility in the human psyche but not much of it represented by current history. Mr. Aron and his accidental version of history is well on his way to reinforcing the meme of the irrepressible human spirit, one in which courageous men and women of all ages and statuses fight valiantly against oppression. Notably, he does not seem to make a single reference to the City of London and its appendages in Israel and Washington, DC.

For Mr. Aron, it is all about the irrepressible nature of the human spirit that accidentally sprung the Arab Spring. For us, history can be explained in part by looking at the power and greed of a handful of Anglo-American, intergenerational banking families that think the world is their plaything and human beings nothing more than pawns, or worse, to be shoved around and manipulated at their whim – like cattle.

The information on the Internet today is the elite's greatest nightmare. What might have taken months of research in the library can be located and ingested in a single hour. Patterns are suddenly evident in history that were not visible before. One can see, say, elite promotions waxing and waning. One can follow the manipulations and put together a timeline as to how they developed and whether they were successful or not.

Increasingly, what Money Power seeks, how it works and why it operates as it does is no secret. These psychopaths wish to create a one-world government and for 100-300 years they have been hard at work doing so. History books and the actors therein are merely the raw material of a drama they continually compose assiduously months, years and decades (or more) in advance.

All this the truth-telling of the Internet reveals if one is willing to look and make some educated guesses about the connections between events that are not merely coincidental but evidently and obviously purposeful.

After Thoughts

That we can write such an article as this and that you, dear reader, can view it and respond to it as you wish (via feedback or your own blogs) is evidence that the elite's ability to write and rewrite history unchallenged is coming to an end. This is further evidence for the dawning of what we have taken to calling the Internet Reformation.